


wicked fang

by fatal



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Dreams, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Post-Timeskip, ch 402 spoilers, sendai frogs sluttification, touch starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:41:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal/pseuds/fatal
Summary: violence as a window
Relationships: Kyoutani Kentarou/Tsukishima Kei
Comments: 50
Kudos: 254





	wicked fang

**Author's Note:**

> [i get mean when i'm nervous like a bad dog](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6mXxxAo31VURsyu5Y5dufj?si=lG5yRBkDQLi_oQDrbF92dw)
> 
> cw: alcohol, implied sexual content, brief mentions of blood/violence, blood choking

_Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence?_  
_I try to smile. What's the difference, really._  
_― Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas_

KENTARO DREAMS HIMSELF INTO HELL. He dreams himself running. Red. A large black hound at his heels. Back already ruptured by the sharp of hooked claws.

And then Kentaro is no longer human—he, too, wears the hound’s curved neck, the hound’s scarlet eyes. Every night is like this. Every night Kentaro’s dreamt body morphs into whatever has been chasing him. He is a boy shaped after his own nightmares, bounding ahead on four limbs as the hound draws nearer, its black body a sleek and furious line.

These visions always end in some kind of injury, some kind of violence, as if his body’s forgotten touch under any other name.

But then he also had April, an almost-softness grazing him beneath a haze of vodka and a sky gone dark. A cloak of slow heat tossed over two bodies, both already warm, both already burning. A sweet, rare instance where being awake felt like a dream.

Upon waking from the dream with the hounds Kentaro’s hands rush to his back, quick to stifle the flood of an invisible wound. There are no indents of fangs, no open flesh from claws. His palms come away sweaty but clean.

* * *

There’d been a moment in first year where Kentaro quit volleyball, sprinting away from his seniors with all the irreverence his limbs could muster. He likes to think his body’s more in control than his brain is. So it’s not his brain that made him jump up alone afterward, hitting ball after ball anyway, until they’d all gone dirty or punctured or flown past the other side of a barbed wire fence. It’s his own body’s fault for trying to retrieve them, pricking his fingers bloody on the tops of the wire.

Kentaro told himself that his return to volleyball in second year, stalking behind Oikawa-san like a scarier shadow, was also a fault of the body. Kentaro’s glaring eyes swept over the members he knew already, Oikawa and Iwaizumi and Matsukawa and Hanamaki. There was still Watari, who had a shaved head too but not for any rebellious reason, and Yahaba, just as doe-eyed and pretty as he was extremely threatening. Then there were the first year starters, Kindaichi and Kunimi, the both of them always joined at the hip.

They both annoyed the shit out of him. Kindaichi, because he kept trying to talk to him like he could understand him if he pried hard enough. Kindaichi and his gelled up hair and nervous smiles and ridiculous height. Kunimi, because of the way he rolled his eyes and slouched against walls and pretended like he didn’t give a fuck about anything. One glance at Kunimi was all it took for Kentaro to know it wasn't real, anyway. Running out of fucks doesn’t make a person indifferent like that.

It shapes a person to be like Kentaro, a beast whose hands and mouth unlatch themselves. The body does what it wants. His hand tells him to burn and so Kentaro obeys, slams his palm perfect against rubber until he’s lost all track of time. His tongue tells him to scream and so he unhinges his jaw, open mouth nudging all of the birds on their wires awake.

Kei sometimes reminds Kentaro of Kunimi back in high school. Not the pre-tense of Kunimi, not his empty apathy. But Kunimi was the only person on the team who didn't try to understand him, or pretend to try. Kentaro had done the same for him, allowing Kunimi to put on his show. He did not dare disrupt the audience. No questions asked. Not even a glance lasting longer than a second.

Kei never tries to understand Kentaro, either. It probably comes with the expectation that Kentaro won't pay attention to him back. Apathy as currency. Yet, he couldn’t offer Kei the exact same indifference. Especially not after April. Especially not when he looks like that.

Kentaro sinks to a crouch beside Kei, who stands leaning against the gymnasium wall. He watches Kei run a hand through overgrown bangs, front strands pasted to his forehead with sweat. His eyes follow the shallow movement of Kei’s throat, long and exposed, as he brings a water bottle to his lips. Kei tilts his head back, swallows. Kentaro’s glance is longer than a second and is getting longer all the time.

Then Kei moves the bottle from his lips and golden eyes cut downward, and Kentaro rushes to twist his head away.

Beside him, Kei asks, “do you want some water, Kyoutani-san?”

Still looking ahead, Kentaro tells him, “no.”

“Okay. Good, because I didn’t want to offer mine anyway.”

* * *

In dreams Kentaro can touch other people. Other people can touch him. Dream-Kentaro lets a hand run down his arm, through his hair, past his sides. Awake he is all claw, all mouth with wicked fang. Asleep he makes himself clawless. Blunt-toothed. It’s as if sleep transports him to an earlier version of himself.

Earlier, like a decade long past, like the still-growing stretch of Kentaro’s fifteen year old body. In second year Kentaro challenged Iwaizumi-san in arm wrestling during a sports festival. He’d felt only the rush of his own heartbeat in his ears, his shortness of breath, the wetness of both his and Iwaizumi-san’s sweat cupped tight between two palms. A thud rung in the air when Iwaizumi-san finally slammed Kentaro's fist onto the table, skin to surface, knuckle bone to wood.

Kentaro’s ears ached with the noise of everyone who watched. So many boys had formed around Kentaro at the centre, but none of them were looking at him. They looked only where Kentaro looked, where everyone's always looked. Iwaizumi-san, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, face splitting into a grin. Laughing, bright and unflinching beneath the heavy gaze of so many boy-eyes.

Kentaro later dreamt his palm burning, the live wire of Iwaizumi’s touch swimming through his body’s red tunnels. Lightning transported on a bed of blood.

And now, asleep, Kentaro becomes this again: defanged, glass-boned, vulnerable to touch. An earlier version of himself.

Kentaro can’t tell where he is. There is only a long fog of blackness, and then a face hovering next to him, warm and alive. Warm enough to be mistaken for an alive thing. A palm drapes over the curve of his jaw and Kentaro’s mouth half-parts in surprise. His bones pull to stillness.

“Kyoutani-san.” Kei’s voice is just above a whisper. It’s so familiar—the tone and volume of it, its exact, airy brush behind the shell of his ear. “Kyoutani-san.”

There are no hounds. “There’s nothing fucking here,” Kentaro breathes out. His eyes sweep again across the blackness overhead. “I’m not anywhere.”

Kei laughs short in his ear. Even in dreams, his laughter is unkind. “Don't be stupid. You’re the architect,” says Kei, palm sliding to rest on the back of his Kentaro’s neck. “This is only another one of your playgrounds. One of your landscapes.”

Kentaro glares, bites out, “It’s empty. I’ve built nothing here.”

“No. I’m here,” says Kei. Dreamt fingers draw circles onto Kentaro’s nape. A shiver dances from the contact and slips wicked down his spine. “You’ve composed me. You are always composing me, Kyoutani-san.”

There is no vacant space. Only Kei in place of a leather couch. Kei’s mouth in place of a ceiling, the curve of his neck instead of a window. No imagined rolling hill or linoleum floor or high and sharp barbed-wire fence. No walls, no earth, no sky.

There is nothing else. Only Kei, composed a hundred times. A hundred of Kentaro’s flyaway daydreams haphazardly rolled into one.

“What are you doing.” Kentaro shuts his dream-eyes and they overlap, for a moment, with the leaden weight of his closed lids in reality.

Another short, cruel laugh. “What am I doing?” The hand on Kentaro’s nape slips up to grip his jaw, twisting his face toward him. This version of Kei wears a slight flush, a slanted mouth, so much like another version of him he'd seen only once before. “This is your dream, Kyoutani-san. What are you making me do?”

Kentaro grits his teeth, says, “I’m not controlling this dream.”

"Oh? But you are." Kei’s dreamt pupils are blown wide. "You always are."

Kentaro exhales and tries to lean back from the dark of his gaze, but Kei's grip on his jaw locks him firm in his place.

Kei is only a mirage. He is only a mirage.

“Kyoutani-san,” Kei says again, and it’s lower still, closer still. “What are you making me do to you?”

Kentaro stays silent, and Kei’s dreamt hand crawls down from his jaw to the centre of his throat, pressing on the Adam’s apple when Kentaro swallows. “Don’t look away,” Kei chides, and his hand grazes down Kentaro’s bare chest, calloused but feather-light.

Kei’s touch travels lower, and lower still. Lower still, lower still. Down Kentaro’s smooth sternum, down the ridges of his abdomen. Hipbone, concave dip of a pelvis, the skin over a muscled thigh.

It’s not real. Kentaro knows it’s not real.

And still, his breathing quickens as if it all is. He tilts his head back like it is. Kentaro buries a hand, thoughtless, into Kei’s blonde nest of hair and pulls, the motion clear as memory.

The silk on his palm feels real enough. The rolling warmth below his waist feels real enough. If Kei is only a mirage, he’s the cruelest Kentaro’s ever dreamt.

* * *

There’s dream-touch. Then there’s the memory of Yahaba shoving him graceless against the gym wall in second year. Instant pain flickered down the roads of Kentaro’s back. He was awake but it was so much like getting scratched by hounds in a dream.

There was so much anger in Yahaba’s stance, in his words, in his glare. Yahaba’s hands, even pressed hot against Kentaro’s shoulders, always looked so elegant. Like something beyond the waking world, something entirely dreamt. Kentaro only glared back at Yahaba, letting himself get shoved and turned over like a doll. He let his body witness the crack of a palm against his cheek, raw and sharp and stunning.

Violence was his window into physical touch. It's nearly intimate, the contact spurred by two red bodies in collision. Air splitting blade-like between two sets of skin. Pain turns into something shared, kept in the cave of his fist like a secret.

That year, he’d let Yahaba tear off the blinds. He’d let Yahaba yank the unclean sliding glass wide open, shaded his eyes from the sting of yellow daylight pouring in. The line of Yahaba’s forearm, pale and guileless in its bridging of the elbow and the wrist, became Kentaro’s line between dreaming and being awake.

Kei is so, so different from Yahaba. Still there’s something in the way he looks at Kentaro that too makes him question, sometimes, how awake he really is. Maybe he never woke. Maybe he’s still dreaming.

But it’s nothing like violence, the careful motions of Kei’s fingers taping Kentaro’s own. It’s not painful, the slow winding, the airy brush of skin. Both of them try not to look too long at the other, but still the heavy air. Still the shared feeling of being half-caught in a dream.

* * *

Kentaro still dreams, sometimes, about that one night in April, Sendai Frogs all packed together at a gaudy karaoke bar in Kokubuncho. His sleeping mind re-builds the room strung with cheap lights, the mint green leather seats, the bitter mouthfuls of vodka. Koganegawa, belting off-tune into a wireless chrome microphone. Kei, red-faced and heavy over Kentaro’s shoulder, loose-limbed and laughing a rare, loud laugh.

Awake, neither Kentaro nor Kei breathe a word of this night. They’d wiped the memory clean off the glass pane of day. But it still exists, sometimes, behind the dark of Kentaro’s eyelids.

In sleep, Kentaro remembers the strange way Kei stood outside his apartment—split straight down the middle, half of him illuminated inside a lamplight’s yellow circle, the other half of him still covered in shadow. The short glimpse of a flush on Kei’s partial face. Then Kei’s heavy-lidded gaze, fixed to Kentaro’s hands twisting the door’s metal handle. Kentaro’s own chin, nodding towards the hallway in silent invitation.

Kei’s mouth was on his before Kentaro could close the door all the way. They’d left a haphazard trail of socks and jackets and shirts and jeans snaking from the shallow wooden genkan to the floor of Kentaro’s bedroom. Kentaro dreams the cool breeze that slipped from a barely cracked-open window, blonde hair in his fist, pink heat of a tongue that’s only ever been mean.

Kei’s hands stroked his jaw, thumbs pressed to Kentaro’s lip. Kentaro dreams the citrus and sandalwood clinging to Kei’s skin, dreams the bitter sharp of vodka curling from his breath. Kei slipped a thumb past Kentaro's teeth while his voice, low and soft beside his ear, kept asking, _Kyoutani-san, is this okay? Is this? Is this okay, too?_

Then—a careful hand curled over the base of Kentaro’s neck, fingers pressed full against the swell of an artery. Kentaro sunk into a lightheadedness he’d felt only once awake. In dreams he reenacts the moment’s short breathing. The dizzy quickness of his blood. The hopeless stutter of his heart.

Kentaro dreams: Kei’s shadow swept dark and cool over him. Their shared weight indenting the top of a mattress without a bed frame. Lingering, dull pain where Kei sunk his teeth into his nape. A firm hand lifting Kentaro’s leg to rest above a muscled shoulder.

Kentaro dreams his own name inside of Kei’s mouth, spun quiet and then shattered. He dreams Kei’s expression, open and almost startled as his frame shuddered above him. Open and almost startled, as if his nearness were an accident.

Sleep became his window into a world tucked in the dark. Kei too became a window. Kei and sleep and violence.

* * *

Kentaro is all sharp edges. Sharp edges and closed fists twitching numbly at his sides. In place of speaking Kentaro wields his own lack of tenderness. His cracked lips. His calloused hands. His shaved, bleached head. A kohl-outlined glare that could scare away ghosts. But he doesn’t need to scare away ghosts, just awake things. Kentaro walks into a room and awake things scatter like dust away from him, swept circular by an invisible broom.

There is no solace in him. The fact of this flares around him like a crackling exclamation mark. Kentaro is all sharp edges. Anyone could look at him and know this. Anyone, anyone—

No, you’re not, says Kei without saying it, mouth twisted smug from his place across the net.

Kei is hideous in green. Hideous in the sports glasses perched above his nose. Then Kei is laughing, and not kindly, and Kentaro is burning steady, his skin flaring red, his hands carried away from him in a show of smoke and ash.

* * *

Whenever Kentaro looks at Kei a month’s worth of dreams ripple hot under his skin. A rapid, thin blue ribbon of fire. Kentaro chooses not to look at him. He runs laps and draws back his arms and collides his fist with rubber, trying to put out the fire with sweat. He doesn’t hear Kei’s voice. He doesn't. He refuses to.

“Kyoutani-san.” Kentaro doesn’t hear it. He doesn’t—

Then he’s yanked roughly by the wrist and forced to drop the ball in his hands. He turns and faces Kei. Hideous and beautiful Kei. More beautiful awake than any version from a dream.

Kentaro tries to turn away, but Kei tugs at his wrist again and Kentaro sucks a breath in. It is all so much like being in a dream. Kentaro wonders for a moment what would happen if he tried to break his hand away. Is this Kei still only an invention? Would he tumble right through the ghost of Kei's hand?

“Kyoutani-san,” Kei says again, and it’s got none of the low, seductive quality he remembers from his dreams. He's glaring behind his glasses, no wine-like flush, no smug, slanted mouth. Only irritation set in the crease between his brows, thinly veiled gravel beneath his smooth words. Kei’s breath is warm and close.

Kentaro breaks his hand away, glares harshly back. He does not pass through Kei’s skin. The warmth from Kei’s grip still circles tight around his wrist.

“Explain to me,” Kei starts, voice curt. “Explain to me why you’ve played like shit this entire week.”

Kentaro breathes out a bitter laugh, twisting his shoulders away again, and then broad hands fly up to his arms and keep him firm in place. “And you won’t—“ Kei pauses, rears his head a little to take in Kentaro’s face. His gaze drills right through the core of him. “You won’t look at me.”

A dozen insults stack themselves up in Kentaro’s throat. A dozen obvious variations of _because you look so fucking ugly._

Instead, Kentaro looks up at Kei and tells him, rough but quiet, “I was distracted.” Then, after a moment’s thought, “by something I want.”

And Kei is there, bright and awake in front of him. Eyes half-lidded behind wire-rimmed glasses. Tall and arrogant and bright and awake.

“What do you want, Kyoutani-san?“ Kei tilts his head, challenging. Bird-like.

Kentaro's never wanted anything extravagant. Nothing more than a reckoning. Nothing more than a ball kissing his hand and sent sprawling somewhere in-bounds. The answer to Kei’s question thrums through the whole of Kentaro like a second pulse, quick and relentless and red.

I want you. I want you. I want you.

Kentaro, crown prince of defiance. Kei, crown prince of disdain. It could never work. Not here, alone at the precipice of a gymnasium with only half its lights flickered on. Not ten years earlier, barely visible to one another from opposite sides of the net. Not in any bar or canyon or bedroom or staircase designed by Kentaro’s sleeping mind. Not in any dreamt architecture. Not in any dream.

Kentaro looks at Kei and wonders what it’s like to desire and have it be simple. To desire with only a human skin. Kentaro can only bring the sharp longing of his fangs. Curved, wistful claws. Black eyes which dart fast away from anything beautiful. And so Kentaro buries his own nose in a nuzzle. Tightens his own leash. And so he asks others to restrain him by way of dark scowl and a crouching fighter’s stance.

Beneath the gymnasium’s silent half-dark, Kentaro, crown prince of defiance, leans in a little closer. Raises a tentative hand to touch a head of overgrown locks.

“Tsukishima,” Kentaro says, and the world is a name in his mouth. "Tsukishima."

**Author's Note:**

> TOUCH STARVED KYOUTANI...... GODDDD THE QUARANTINE PROJECTION IN THIS ONE.


End file.
